Netherlands

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The British Film Institute has been unable to locate a print of the film for inclusion in the BFI National Archive, and classes it as “missing, believed lost”. There is increasing interest by film historians in Gréville’s directorial career, with the same year’s Noose being particularly highly regarded. The current absence of But Not in Vain represents a crucial gap in Gréville’s filmography, and the BFI lists the film as one of its “75 Most Wanted” missing British feature films.Read More »

Synopsis
Phases of Matter follows living and inanimate residents of a teaching hospital in Istanbul, moving from the operating room to the morgue, between life and other states, the real and the virtual.Read More »

The Story: 170 Hz is a film about unconditional love and the freedom that goes with it. Nick and Evy are two adolescents who fall hopelessly in love with each other. Their love has no voice or sound as they are both deafmute. They have their own ways of communicating with each other, so while being in love already makes them stand apart from the rest of the world, in the splendid isolation of their soundless love they distance themselves from their surroundings even more. When they sense that their parents do not fully agree with them being together, they develop an audacious plan: they will flee and hide in a special place, where Evy will become pregnant and have a baby – they are convinced that once they have a child together nothing and nobody will be able to keep them apart. Nick takes the initiative and drives off with Evy to the hiding place he has meticulously prepared, the wreck of a former Soviet submarine in a distant part of the harbour…Read More »

The small-screen penchant for overwrought breast cancer melodramas tends to drown out more psychologically acute portrayals, so it’s refreshing to find a film that addresses the issue in a restrained yet emotionally engaging way. Helmer Martin Koolhoven is known for eliciting topnotch performances from his actors, and “South” is no exception. A simply told story that mostly eschews fireworks in favor of character, pic’s exploration of a woman’s inability to reintegrate her life after a mastectomy could attract an arthouse crowd with its sympathetic handling.Read More »

Housewife Christine M. tries to shoplift some merchandise from a boutique in a shopping mall but is caught by the male shopkeeper. Christine and two other customers, waitress Annie and secretary Anna, beat the man to death, witnessed by a large group of other female shoppers. They are tried with murder and deny the plea of insanity that the male prosecutor and judges assume they should plead. The female criminal psychiatrist assigned to ascertain their level of sanity comes to identify with the women’s situations and concludes that they are not insane but have been driven to murder by the strain of living in a patriarchy. This feminist drama in which a Woman Psychiatrist is appointed by the Court to investigate the sanity of three women, all strangers, for beating a male boutique owner to death.Read More »

North/South Triptych – Part I. The impending birth of the director’s youngest child motivates him to explore the society in which it will have to live. Shot in the Cameroons, Morocco and the Netherlands, this film, the first of a series of three, attempts to define, from hoe to computer, the relationship between the poor, developing countries of the South and the rich, industrialized Northern countries.Read More »

Laarmans (Romain De Coninck) is an old man, and finds his family life claustrophobic. Most evenings, he escapes the confines of the house and wanders around Antwerp’s red-light district. Three Afghani men who have become sailors approach him one evening, asking him to help them find a certain girl. But it seems they were given a false address. In the middle of the night all of them are searching and hoping. As he wanders around the city with the three sailors, he fantasizes about what this girl must be like…Read More »

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Through her very real subject Edgar Figner, director Nathalie Alonso Casale offers us an intimate sense of the 21st-century Russian zeitgeist. A true alchemist, Mr. Figner has spent his life in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) as a sound-effects artist at Lenfilm Studios, where from the silent era to the present he has used commonplace objects (cabbages, old shoes) to create complex sound effects for films. Under the pressures of contemporary Russian life, Figner begins to retreat into a past comprising his own personal history and the history of Russian cinema. As reality and memory blend with stunning scenes from Soviet films, Figner’s art becomes a soundtrack for the muffled culture created by the repression of the Soviet era. This delicate mix of documentary, reality and cinematic imagination creates a deeply sensitive account of the silences at the heart of the Russian social, political and cinematic experience.Read More »

With very little dialogue, this Dutch film artfully details the declining years of the legendary master artist, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69), who ended his days in near-poverty. In the movie, van Rijn has just moved to Amsterdam and, following the death of his wife, takes to riotous living with easy women and too much drink, spending himself into penury. The filmmakers have taken great care to ensure that what is seen on the screen resembles the lively paintings of the Great Master himself. (Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide)Read More »